Tell Me Your Views on the Tea Party

I would like to do a piece on my blog, Releasing Religion, regarding mixing God & government. And I'd like to know what opinions people have here about doing such a thing. Some points to mention are:

Glenn Beck is well known for arguing that we have misunderstood that founding fathers & their desire to keep church & state separate. Holding his rally on 8/28, he gathered 150.000 people to hear him talk about bringing out country "back to God". What do you think it would do to our country to "get back to God"?

The Tea Party has been called racist Chrisotcrats. In their recent convention, most conference sessions began with prayers. What do you think of the Tea Party? Do you know very little about them? Do you know a lot? Please share your thoughts here.

Replies to This Discussion

The Teabaggers are just Libertarian wannabe dupes of the GOP. Though the last time the GOP co-opted a movement, the Moral Majority loons took the party over, so this is just part of the ongoing self-destruction of the Republican Party. They'll pick up seats this fall, but that just means they'll have a bigger platform to display their lunacy, and the Dems will benefit in 2012. I think we're going to end up with a dominant Democratic Party with a big and influential Blue Dog wing, a Tea Party where all the conservative Christians end up, and a somewhat larger Libertarian Party when the Libertarians flirting with the Tea Party pull their heads out and realize how religious the Tea Party is.

The Republibaggertarians are primarily driven by fear--fear of foreigners, immigrants, minorities, atheists, the educated, the government, bureaucracy--but also by myopia and ignorance. They don't like large systems that they can't understand, even when they benefit from them. They don't trust their fellow citizens to do the right thing. They are convinced that government itself is evil. Why anybody would vote for a candidate who thinks government is evil is beyond me.

Since the loony right is convinced that government is awful, their primary answer to everything is to lower taxes, to starve the beast, to let people control their own money, thereby leading to the best of all possible societies. Of course, that really only leads to the most selfish of all possible societies. And what's really bad about this is the dangerous idea that taxes are inherently inimical to an economy, as though money raised by taxes is simply taken out back and burned. It's not. It gets pumped right back into the economy, unlike tax cuts for the wealthy, which mostly just sit there.

The whole supply side worldview is just so incomplete. Without demand, supply doesn't do any good. If the wealthy keep more of their money because of tax cuts, they're not going to spend it because they don't need anything--demand will not be stimulated. Of course poor people don't pay taxes, so tax cuts don't help them, and people in the middle don't pay very much in taxes, so tax cuts don't save them very much and don't provide them with much extra cash to go out and spend. Poor people can't create demand because they can't afford to buy anything. Rich people don't need anything. People in the middle are crushed in an economy that doesn't need to hire any workers (oversupply of labor), and so they hoard what they do have, making the problem worse. The Teabaggers don't get that taxes can actually stimulate the economy by taking money from people who aren't using it and putting it to work. Government spending is important in a down economy. The government is the consumer of last resort. It's appalling that the lessons of The Great Depression have already been forgotten, but with nutjobs like Beck and the rest of the Fox gang running around subverting history, it's not terribly surprising.

With the Koch brothers trying to buy up the scraps of the GOP and Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck pontificating so rabidly in their underwear, I think we might as well admit that the Republican Party, the Tea Party, and the Libertarian Party are really all one three-headed hydra.

"This may seem to discount or ignore the apparent flood of new political volunteers who go to make up the Tea Party movement. But how fresh and original are these faces? They come from a long and frankly somewhat boring tradition of anti-incumbency and anti-Washington rhetoric, and they are rather an insult to anyone with anything of a political memory. Since when is it truly insurgent to rail against the state of affairs in the nation's capital? How long did it take Gingrich's "rebel" forces in the mid-1990s to become soft-bottomed incumbents in their turn? Many of the cynical veterans of that moment, from Dick Armey to John Boehner, are the effective managers and controllers of the allegedly spontaneous Tea Party wave we see today."http://www.slate.com/id/2270651/

Forgive me for taking a page out of Hitchens, but I feel that it sums my thoughts on the Tea Party quite well.

Interesting article... and by Hitchens no less. He really does bring up a good point when he asks what normal person would put themselves willingly under the kind of scrutiny a political candidate does. Did you read the comments below the article. So varied!

The Tea Party started out Libertarian and quickly got gobbled up, mashed up and deformed into a sadistically twisted heap of corporate propaganda coated with a heavy layer of religious lunacy.
These ultra rightwing conservative holy rollers are infiltrating every government position they can throw a bible at. Everywhere from federal to state and local government, the Tea baggers are taking over government while railing against government takeover. This is a dream come true for corporate America and their ambition for a pure corporatist oligarchy.

Our corporate masters already have the Supreme Court under their thumb and thanks to their ruling, corporations are people too and can spend an abyss filled with money on any candidate they know will serve the bottom line. The corporate powers that be have long since figured out how to use that age old manipulation tool (Religion), and can easily manipulate these poor suckers into voting the very shirts off their backs because gays are getting married.

If this November the Republicans take congress, then by 2012 it’s good morning President Palin.
What? I can’t use fear either to light a fire under our collective liberal butts? Get moving people, this is for REAL!!!

Come on, now Dustin, while I share your views on the TP AND your concerns about the corporate oligarchy, I'm don't get the leap from "Republicans taking Congress" in a midterm election which the opposition party nearly always takes, to "President Palin" in 2012.

Could it be just the opposite? Could the newly elected lunatics actually do the opposite and force a hard turn to the left in 2012 and even 2014?